What is a MarTech Stack and How do I Build One?

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Dan Purvis is Founder & Director at Comms Axis, a full-service marketing agency specializing in content marketing, social media and digital marketing for businesses of all sizes.

Ranked by Brand Republic as one of the Top 50 UK Marketing and Social Media influencers, Dan Purvis is passionate about the philosophy behind Comms Axis: they bring content, marketing and sales together to connect businesses with their audiences.

Dan Purvis, Director at Comms Axis shows brands how to build a balanced MarTech stack for success, efficiency and ROI

The term ‘stack’ has been bandied about in the technology industry for decades. Once used mainly in computer hardware and programming, stack has become much more common in everyday use for marketing and it works on the basis of tools building together and running together in a ‘stack-like’ process. Applications and software will run on or on top of other elements in the stack and many will be inter-reliant.

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Your business’ MarTech stack will bring together everything you need to succeed in marketing operations with the right technology in place. The common types of stack most businesses use are built with a mixture of different technologies and software, although some choose to differentiate between software and tech stacks in the following ways:

Software stacks are bundles of software which are essential for the backend of a site working successfully. Software stacks can be far reaching and expand from elements such as the operating system to specific applications chosen to streamline processes and enhance results.

Tech stacks are usually more complex and are more infrastructure based, designed to ensure the backend of any given computer system, server or network.

Marketing technology, or MarTech, brings the idea of the stack to a new kind of technology and audience. Your MarTech stack is designed to make your marketing efforts more effective, efficient and tailored to your business.

Defining the MarTech Stack

In the most basic terms, any business’ MarTech Stack is a selection of tools chosen to make marketing operations and processes more effective and efficient. Tools can incorporate SaaS platforms, social media tools, content management systems, analytics tools and many other types, dependent on the business in question.

Dependent on the size and needs of any individual business, the marketing stack will change. Many tools may be needed and may feed into different departments if necessary to ensure smooth, efficient running at every level of any given campaign or contract.

A good indicator of just how important technology has become to marketing is Gartner’s forecast that in five years’ time chief marketing officers will be spending more on technology than chief information officers. The alone shows how important technology has become to marketing and how each business needs to assess their own needs to create their optimal stack. This is one area where there is no fit-all solution; marketing departments need to look at their own specific requirements, clients and campaigns, and build their stack based on this.

Take webinars as an example. A webinar would at the very least require a landing page to get people signed up, content in the form of sales and marketing text, not to mention setting up and webinar itself. It would then need to be promoted via email and social media marketing as well as customer and prospect targeting via the sales team using a CRM solution. This one example shows just how much goes into each element of a marketing campaign and how the MarTech stack is integral as the different parts work in collaboration – even promoting a webinar involves several technologies, and this is just one element of a larger marketing and/or business development campaign.

Building your MarTech Stack

As mentioned every business’ MarTech stack is unique and specific but there are some key elements that most will incorporate alongside other tools from integrated departments. Below are some of the key types of tool and technology you’d expect in a typical MarTech stack.

Content Management System (CMS)

An essential platform for running your website, blog or other web-based product for online business marketing. CMS are popular because they allow non-technical staff and teams to log into the site and make changes as necessary, upload content, and more.

Advertising Tools

Advertising tools usually incorporate paid advertising options but also tracking and measuring capabilities. Tools such as Google AdWords, Bing Ads and Facebook Power Editor are examples of common advertising tools you may choose to integrate into your marketing technology stack.

Conversion Tools

Converting traffic into leads and leads into customers is essentially the core point of any marketing campaign. Tools such as Crazy Egg track on-site behaviour so you can pick out conversion leads and unbounce too is very popular.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is the backbone of almost all marketing campaigns and the right technologies can make it even more successful, speed up the testing stages and track results more efficiently. Some organisations will opt for a simple email marketing tool which helps with the design and has some analytics elements whereas others require something much more robust such as Infusionsoft.

Social Media

All businesses will have their chosen social media channels setup and may use particular tools, like the popular Hootsuite and Buffer, to automate them. This too forms part of the MarTech stack. Whether it’s simply a platform for scheduling and automating, a relationship platform for driving engagements, or an in-depth tool for analysis and channel performance measurement, there are effective tools for all aspects of social media.

Customer Service

Leading on from social media is the need for tools which focus on customer service. The customer experience should be a core focus of any marketing campaign and the channels and methods used to shape this experience will include the above marketing methods such as social media and email marketing and much more. Customer service has become very much focused on social media since the average customer now expects brands to use their social channels that way whether they’re high street banks or niche retailers. Making the most of social media analytics as a customer service channel can be facilitated with the right MarTech tools, as this data from Sotrender’s analysis of the relationship between customer service and social media shows:

You can see how a quick reaction time of UK brands to a customer’s Facebook query doesn’t necessarily equate to great customer service as not all posts are responded to by the brands. It may not always be possible or appropriate to respond to all posts, but getting the balance right is vital to delivering customer care. Furthermore, Twitter is commonly used to resolve issues – Nike is a great example of a brand responding with speed and professionalism to help a customer.

Customer Relationship Management

The more marketing channels a business leverages, the more important tracking and data management become. A good quality customer relationship management system helps to record and track all your customer relationships across different platforms. A good CRM system is essential to your stack as it will ensure you can adequately monitor activity across different platforms and applications.

Automation Software

Marketing automation has become almost synonymous with successful campaigns and companies. Elements of sales and marketing can be fully automated, taking away wasted manpower and time. Marketing automation comes in many sizes – from email marketing to responsive landing pages, or from A/B testing tools to reporting and analytics software.

Web Analytics

Google Analytics and other similar tools are the linchpin of your stack. Integral to seeing whether most of your other tools are working, analytics tools track and measure all of your sales and marketing activities so you can pinpoint what works and what doesn’t.

The MarTech Stack Balance

As the word “stack” suggests, your MarTech tools are not something to consider in isolation, it’s a blend and mixture of all of the tools that deliver overall marketing success and each individual piece of marketing ROI.

Good balance is key to a successful MarTech stack, and this is something you often learn over time with trial and error of different tools. Once you begin integrating technologies and developing your stack you’ll see how your time and energies can be focused on the more creative and innovative elements of marketing, with the tools supporting your choices and decisions.